Papa John's Schnatter Says He Will Honor Obamacare And Give Health Insurance To All Employees

Rick Ungar
, ContributorI write from the left on politics and policy.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

In an op-ed written by Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter and published in The Huffington Post on Tuesday, Mr. Schnatter suggests that his intentions regarding the implementation of Obamacare for Papa John's employees have been misunderstood and that he plans to provide health care benefits to all of his corporate employees along with all employees working in his company owned stores.

Writes Schnatter-

“Papa John's, like most businesses, is still researching what the Affordable Care Act means to our operations. Regardless of the conclusion of our analysis, we will honor this law, as we do all laws, and continue to offer 100% of Papa John's corporate employees and workers in company-owned stores health insurance as we have since the company was founded in 1984.”

This is good news, indeed.

Papa John’s—and Mr. Schnatter himself—has been the subject of considerable criticism, including in this column , as a result of what has been believed to be his plan to avoid the requirements of the Affordable Care Act by cutting back employee schedules to less than 30 hours per week. Such a move would have exempted Papa John’s from the law’s requirements, resulting in employees not only being denied healh insurance but further punished by losing a large percentage of their income.

According to Mr. Schnatter, his plans with respect to his employees—and the requirement to provide them with a health care benefit—were taken out of context based on remarks he made when speaking to an entrepreneur class at a Florida college.

“Schnatter estimated that these rising costs could adversely affect his workers. Since only full-time employees working 30 hours or more must be covered under the new law, he said he expects franchise owners will be forced to cut employees' hours because they can't afford the costs of health insurance plans. "That's probably what's going to happen," he said according to NaplesNews.com. "It's common sense. That's what I call lose-lose."

And then there was the conference call with Papa John’s shareholders earlier this year where Schnatter added, “We're not supportive of Obamacare, like most businesses in our industry. But our business model and unit economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb Obamacare. If Obamacare is in fact not repealed, we will find tactics to shallow out any Obamacare costs (emphasis added) and core strategies to pass that cost onto consumers in order to protect our shareholders best interests."

On that same call—and on other occasions—Schnatter indicated that the additional cost for a pizza could rise by 11 to 14 cents per pizza, however, Forbes writer Caleb Melby estimates those costs to be closer to 4 cents per pie.